In September 2016 I posted about my visit to the library at the Museum of Modern Art where works of Judy Malloy are archived. My research uncovered some interesting information about Uncle Roger 3.1, a version I had not yet had the opportunity to see firsthand. I also was able to see a pattern in the motifs Malloy used in much of her work, chronicling a list of them starting with her hand-drawn graphic narrative, “Come Back, Kitty Kitty Kitty” (1979), to the catalog card truisms, “Bad Information” (1986-88).

I was pleased to learn from Malloy in her Twitter post that the MoMA Library had written about my visit in a Tumblr. Below is what it said:

In celebration of the Electronic Literature Organization‘s move to WSUV, we are hosting a series of events in the Electronic Literature Lab (ELL). One of these is the 1stGen of E-Lit Traversals. It is a monthly live Facebook and videotaped Reader Traversals of electronic literature produced between 1986-1997. Seven are planned during 2017-2018. So far five of the authors have given permission for it. Here are the dates, times, and works scheduled thus far.

Jasmine Mulliken, from Stanford University Press, who participated in the “Documenting Born Digital Media” course that Ryan House and I taught last week at the Digital Humanities Summer Institute, has written a wonderful essay, entitled “Sustainable Design for the Digital Age,” about her experience in the course. The essay highlights the effectiveness of the Pathfinders methodology Stuart Moulthrop and I developed for preserving born digital literature and makes the case (that Stuart & have done in many places) that it extends beyond literature to games, interactive environments, apps, and such. Here is the link to her essay.

Noted DH scholar & publisher James O’Sullivan recently wrote a report for The AcademicBook of the Future project of the about publication efforts that push against traditional scholarly publishing through”open access publishing and the digital revolution.” His report, entitled “Scholarly Equivalents of the Monograph? An Examination of some Digital Edge Cases,” lists several examples of this kind of scholarly publishing, including Pathfinders. Leading the The Academic Book of the Future were Nick Canty ( UCL) and Marilyn Deegan and Simon Tanner, Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London with Michael Jubb serving as principal consultant to the project. The project ran from on 1 October 2014 to 30 September 2016.

Here is a direct quote about Pathfinders from the final report:

Produced by Dene Grigar and Stuart Moulthrop, Pathfinders documents a selection of early born-digital literature. The project emphasises pre-Web hypertextual works from 1986-1995. Pathfinders looks to document the experience of this first-generation of electronic literature by recording interactions with the authors of the works, as well as traversals by readers interacting with the pieces. In addition to the audio-visual materials, Grigar and Moulthrop have a forthcoming print monograph, Traversals (MIT Press), with close readings of these works. Grigar describes Pathfinders as the methodology, and Traversals as a process of that methodology. This project is an interesting example of how edge cases interact with more traditional forms, being both resource and insight at once.

With 173 pages containing over 100 videos, 200 photos, and several sound files and a lot of writing, it is heartening to see Pathfinders find recognition as a book project, for it certainly felt like writing one. Stuart and I appreciate the ongoing support of colleagues likes James and organizations like the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the British Library, UCL, King’s College, who make the case for experimental writing and publishing projects. I am also pleased that James included in his report Leonardo Flores’ important critical work with I Love E-Poetry.

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The end result of the week of reading and discussing theoretical works that underpin the approach, experiencing works already obsolete (or on the way to that state), and working with tools for documenting works is fairly substantial body of output by five teams of participants. The projects include:

A multimedia book of videos, photos, and descriptive writing built on the Scalar platform for Brian Eno’s “Bloom” app

Entries in the ELMCIP Knowledge Base, the Electronic Literature Directory, and Wikipedia; and a multimedia book of videos, photos, and descriptive writing built on the Scalar platform for the electronic literary work, “Whispering Galleries” by Amaranth Borsuk and Brad Bouse

A multimedia book of videos, photos, and descriptive writing built on the Scalar platform for a student made video game that critiques The Stanley Parable

Entries in the ELMCIP Knowledge Base, the Electronic Literature Directory, and Wikipedia; and a multimedia book of videos, photos, and descriptive writing built on the Scalar platform for the electronic literary work, “Chessbard” by Aaron Tucker

A multimedia book of videos, photos, and descriptive writing built on the Scalar platform for an interactive environment called “Enchanting the Desert,” by Nicholas Bauch

Julia interviewing “Chessbard’s” Aaron Tucker

Teams undertook Traversals and Interviews and learned, in some cases, how to prepare media for publication. Working with me has been Ryan House, my research assistant in the Electronic Literature Lab. To UVic we brought equipment like a light tent, lighting, cameras, and video cameras for use by participants for documenting their work. Here is a link to their projects.

This course has made it clear to me that the Pathfinders methodology is effective and can, indeed, be used for a broad application to wide variety of born digital media.

Traversals: The Use of Preservation for Early Electronic Writing has been released. The book, published by The MIT Press, applies the pathfinders methodology and traversals process that Stuart Moulthrop and I developed in our Pathfinders project, to four works of electronic literature: Judy Malloy’s Uncle Roger, John McDaid’s Uncle Buddy’s Phantom Funhouse, Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl, and Bill Bly’s We Descend. This first stage of our work resulted in a multimedia, open-source book, called Pathfinders: Documenting the Experience of Early Digital Writing.

The research for Pathfinders took place in ELL, the lab that I direct here at WSUV, with two of the traversals––McDaid’s and Jackson’s––also videotaped here. To write my chapters of Traversals, I spent much of my time reviewing the works on the computers in the lab and consulting the data Stuart and I collected in the Pathfinders book, even fine tuning that information as I delved further into comparing versions and conducting archival research at Duke’s and MoMA’s libraries.

Yesterday Stuart and I received the art for the book cover for Traversals. This book, published by The MIT Press, follows the open-source book, Pathfinders, both of which the result of the research we undertook for the Pathfinders Project. Traversals is scheduled to come out in less than 6 weeks. I will take no breather after this, but rather plan to plunge right into the next projects–Volume 2 of Pathfinders and the completion of Electronic Literature: Contexts, Forms and Practices, with James O’Sullivan, for West Virginia University Press.

The excerpt, below, comes from the keynote I gave at the 2016 International Digital Media Arts Association Conference.

You’re watching a video of Amaranth Borsuk demonstrating Whispering Galleries, a work derived from a diary dating to the 1850s. The work itself is an interactive narrative that allows Borsuk to erase words from the screen by gesturing over a Leap Motion device. Doing so reveals words that comprise a poem. To change the diary’s pages, she gestures a swipe over the device. What you many may not notice right away is that the computer’s camera is capturing her image and incorporating it into the interface of the work, in essence, resulting in her becoming part of the work as she experiences it.

So my questions to you are: How does one preserve a work like Whispering Galleries for posterity? How do we preserve any creative work of art that requires us to interact with it? That involves a media rich sensory experience, involving movement, sound, and gesture that cannot be captured in print? That has been published on and for digital technologies that are no longer available––I mean, how many peripherals like joysticks, game controllers, power gloves have been abandoned because they no longer work for the systems we now use? Leap Motion may very well be another. These are some of the questions that have shaped my research into preservation of electronic literature for the last eight years and that form the topic of my talk today.

Part 1 Why Preserve Visceral MediaSince 1991 I’ve collected a type of digital creative art known as electronic literature. Many of you recognize this art form as digital narratives, kinetic or animated poems, hypertext fiction and poetry, interactive drama, literary games, and many other born digital forms that possess a literary quality and are produced for and intended to be experienced with/on digital devices. To date, I own over 200 of these works in my personal library at Washington State University Vancouver.

Besides being digital, this kind of work is also visceral with viscera associated with the body’s internal organs––the heart, liver, and gut––which are both physical and fragile.

By physical, I mean they’re works that involve kinestheti­c activity––that is, they elicit non-trivial physical intervention by the user. Whispering Galleries serves as an example, but so do many others. Even early electronic literature like Judy Malloy’s database novel Uncle Roger, created with Applesoft BASIC and published on a 5 ¼-inch floppy from 1986 to 1988, required users to intervene physically in a non-trivial way in order to access the narrative programmed in the database.

They may also be kinetic, with images being made to move due to physical intervention of the user. Along with Borsuk’s piece, I am thinking here of others, like Jason Edward Lewis’s The Great Migration. Developed as an app for mobile devices, it consists of strange creatures swimming across the screen. When they are “tamped down” by the user’s finger, they writhe and spin in resistance, responding to the user’s touch by emitting tiny bubbles into their habitat.

Though Whispering Galleries doesn’t utilize sound, many others do. In fact, electronic literature artists have worked to incorporate sound from very early on. One of the first is John McDaid’s hypertext novel Uncle Buddy’s Phantom Funhouse created with Hypercard 2.0 and published in 1993. It came packaged with two audiocassettes that augmented the narrative with musical compositions by the titular character, Uncle (Arthur) “Buddy” Newkirk.

Like Whispering Galleries, they may also produce an embodied experience. Kate Pullinger’s interactive novel, The Breathing Wall, published in 2004 on CD came packaged with a headset whose mouthpiece users breathed into in order to access portions of the story. In effect, it incorporated the user intimately into the work, turning the human body into one of the media of its multimedia.

Also like Whispering Galleries is Erik Loyer’s literary app, Breathing Room, has users gesturing with their hands over a Leap Motion device and so controlling the story with their actions.

. . . And so on and so on and so on. To sum up, visceral media are physical media involving non-trivial user interaction, media rich experiences, and embodied action. They are not limited to electronic literature. They can also include video games, media art, and other digital forms.

Any of us who has had a floppy disk fail, a computer crash, a website disappear know that visceral media can also be fragile media. They’re reliant upon supporting hardware and software. It was a rude awakening to discover the 3 ½-inch diskettes I bought in 1995 were no longer readable three years later on the G3 iMac I was given to teach with because Apple no longer offered a floppy drive on that computer. My many CDs are today unreadable on my current iMac, a situation that actually began when Apple omitted the disk drive on its MacBook Air and Mac Mini earlier. Recognizing this problem I began collecting, along with electronic literature, the hardware and software needed to continue accessing my collection. The result is the development of the Electronic Literature Lab, or ELL, where I’ve amassed 47 computers covering every operating system and a robust collection of vintage software needed for accessing my collection. These are Macs, for the most part, dating back to 1977––and a few PCs running Windows 95 and 2000.

You may wonder at this juncture why I have been concerned about documenting this art. I mean, it’s one thing to keep 200 floppies and CDs from the late 1980s to the mid 2000s around, but another to commit one’s self––one’s research and resources––to saving them from extinction. But let me frame the problem this way: Only three poems of Sappho’s nine books are left to us due in part because the medium with which they were produced––papyri––is fragile and, so, rotted over time. Also contributing to their loss were better and easier writing technologies that were developed and implemented for disseminating literary art.

Bits also rot. Physical objects corrupt. Better and easier digital technologies have been developed and implemented for disseminating digital literary art since the introduction of floppy disks, CDs, Flash and a whole host of other abandonware. Like Sappho’s lyrical poetry, which spoke to the cultural output of 8th Century BCE, thousands of hypertext narratives and poems, kinetic poetry, animated text, interactive fiction, flash-based art, literary apps, and other forms of digital literature that speak to the experimental cultural output of the late 20th and early 21st century period will very soon no longer be available to the public. My lab staves this problem off––but only for a time. The general idea is to document as many works of electronic literature as I can before there are no parts left to fix my computers when they break and no back up software available for reading the works when my copies finally all fail.

Pathfinders is being taught at Whittier College this semester in a course called Digital Textuality. Students in the course are reading the chapter on Shelley Jackson and watching the videos from her Traversal. Here’s the link to the syllabus: http://digitaltext.anitaconchita.org

During my visit to the MoMA Library to document its version of Uncle Roger, I had the opportunity to examine other works by Malloy that pre-date Uncle Roger, some by as much as six years. I had written in my chapter on Malloy in Traversals that she explores similar motifs in her work––both Uncle Roger and its name was Penelope, which she produced later, for example,include references to boats and water. But it was enlightening to see the extent of her exploration in earlier works.

Below is the list of art works studied. I have noted motifs in those that are also found in Uncle Roger. The most interesting can be found in “Eschew Gluttony,” which features a character named Roger who is as Falstaffian as Uncle Roger. Also note the focus on cats, computers, card catalog cards,sex, food, potato chips, cockroaches, and a blimp. These motifs are fully developed in Uncle Roger.

This discovery underscores that Uncle Roger was many years in the making, the logical culmination of her visual art practice, and at the same time the beginning of her experimentation with new digital media that came into full flower with its name is Penelope.

Come Back, Kitty Kitty Kitty (1979)Hand-drawn graphic narrative
This is the only early work that had a sales price on it ($.75)
Appears in 500 3 x 5 Cards and Other Stories (#6 in the book)
***Includes references to cats

Honesty Is the Best Policy (1979) Hand-drawn graphic narrative
Appears in 500 3 x 5 Cards and Other Stories (#1 in the book). Includes references to cats, cockroaches, sex, a computer, card catalog cards

Eschew Gluttony (1979) Hand-drawn graphic narrative
Appears in 500 3 x 5 Cards and Other Stories (#2 in the book). Includes a character named Roger, who is very much like Uncle Roger; also references to food, potato chips

Is Everybody Done Now? (1980)Hand-drawn graphic narrative
Looks like it was intended for card catalog
Appears in 500 3 x 5 Cards and Other Stories (#7 in the book)
***Includes references to a character named David; references food

A Year in Reno (1980)Hand-drawn graphic narrative, organized around the conceit of a calendar
Appears in 500 3 x 5 Cards and Other Stories (#10 in the book).
Includes references to a cat

And Then (1980)Hand-drawn graphic narrative, organized around the conceit of a calendar
Looks like it was intended for card catalog but is not (missing dots for holes)
Appears in 500 3 x 5 Cards and Other Stories (#11 in the book).
Includes references to cats, food

Dallas Berkeley (1981)Hand-drawn graphic narrative, organized around the conceit of a calendar
Appears in 500 3 x 5 Cards and Other Stories (#8 in the book)

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About Pathfinders

The Pathfinders project is led by Dr. Dene Grigar, Director and Associate Professor of the Creative Media & Digital Culture Program at Washington State University Vancouver; and Dr. Stuart Moulthrop, Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee. The project is funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.